How to Handle Major Life Changes

If you're like me, we found out my husband's job is moving in a year to Tennessee. We live in California. If you're like me, I just sold my home and moved into my husband. If you're like me, I am studying to be a nurse and will be on the verge of leaving my job in a year. With timing almost everything, and the future certainly unknown, how do we handle life's major stress balls?

Major changes in your life are inevitable. Whether your looking for a job, turning in your two week resignation from a decade long job, changing careers, moving to a new city or new home, buying a new home, or how little or big the change is, the stress ultimately follows.

If you're like me, you worry about the future (part of anxious mind really), what will it entail, will you flounder or sink? Will you be happy in the end? After all those times, you reflect, journal, hope, and if you're spiritual, you pray. Is it enough?

Research has found that people are more resilient when they use control coping. There are two ways people tend to cope with major stresses coming their way. Like a train coming at you, you decide your fate. Either "escape coping" in which you dodge the change by avoiding it all together or you "control cope" in which you learn to handle the rail ahead of you.

Escape coping is like not showing up to work when the change comes because you don't want to hear it. Or avoiding important phone calls from people who are part of the change like your real estate agent wanting you to move forward with the documents. Or worse yet, you turn to negative behaviors like drugs and alcohol to cope instead of reaching out for help.

Control cope, as you may have possibly guessed, is proactive. You know the change is coming, so you pre-plan your steps to move towards to change. For example, if you're learning your company is moving to another state and you have to face the fact you have to find a new job after 10 years, then you look online just to see what the job market is like. You may start to open up that resume you haven't looked at in over 10 years.

So how do we use this information to effectively handle major consequences that comes our way?

Try the pairing technique.

"In the study, 31 college students were recruited for an intensive lifestyle change program; 15 participated in the intervention and 16 were in the waitlist control group. Those in the intervention put in five hours a day each weekday for six weeks. They did 2.5 hours of physical exercise (including yoga and Pilates), one hour of mindfulness practice and 1.5 hours of lecture or discussion on topics such as sleep, nutrition, exercise, mindfulness, compassion, relationships or well being. The were advised to limit alcohol consumption to one drink a day, eat a diet of mostly whole foods and sleep 8-10 hours a day. "

"Recent research suggests its often more effective to make two or more changes simultaneously, especially when those changes reinforce one another. It's easier to drink less coffee if at the same time you get more sleep."

The number one effective way to handle life changes is:

1) use control cope by working to adjust to the new change and paring technique.

• Find a new job -> create a plan like a timeline -> small goal like look through resume and fine tune it = (at the same time )-> copy and paste links to jobs you may likely apply for

• Moving to a new city/new home -> preplan move (write down the final date to move out) ->small goal like rid clutter at least a month before the move = (at the same time) -> inform the post office of new address, update credit cards, bills of new address

The goal is to reinforce both tasks on each other so that the change is more effective. Some people have noted that writing checklist increases chances to do two things at the same time thus alleviating stress when the change occurs.

Here are a few tips to handle the life change:

2) Write down the consequences if you avoid the change and let a significant other know what will happen if you use the avoid ant coping technique. It turns out that when we let people know the negative things we do, we make ourselves more accountable and less likely to act on them.

“Uncertainty simply means I don’t know the future. It does not mean the future is bad.”

3) Since I say "embrace future" is all BS, and planning for every possibility may seem futile, the best advice is to deal with it when it happens, when you cross the bridge, and have ready your friends and family if a real emergency happens. Since we can't ultimately predict the future, and we know the future doesn't necessarily mean it's bad, we need to have available the resources to pull ourselves through it.

This may need to call a friend for advice, consult with a lawyer, use that Google on others experiences who pulled through. The important thing is you need find the resources to handle the change. At least you know where to go to and it's important that you have that type of control then trying to figure out yourself.

Remember, the "wheel" is already invented, you don't need to reinvent it, just look around for it.

#selfcare #future #goodandbad #resilient #life #stress #control #resources